With the economy picking up, Computer Weekly asked CIOs and IT experts what they believe will be
the biggest areas of IT
investment in 2014, and how different industries will be spending their IT
budgets.

Martin
Thompson, chair of the campaign for clear licensing, said: "2014 is the year the enterprise
will bite back, the year enterprises begin to claw back control from overbearing software
publishers and sloppy licensing and audit practice."

"We will start to see more devices being connected to each other, typically via a datacentre, to
improve the automation and intelligence of everyday objects. This is something CIOs need to take
into account in their strategic planning this year,” said Rasit.

This will involve evaluating how the traditional infrastructure of buildings, roads and smarter
cities will affect their business and the datacentre environment they need to build for the
future.

Cloud computing is set to gain momentum. The TechTarget
2014 Buying Intentions survey of 770 IT professionals in Europe found that 25% of those
asked will be building a private cloud this year, while 22% plan to use an external cloud provider.
With more applications being delivered via the cloud, there is set to be an explosion of software
as a service (SaaS) providers.

Rory
Canavan, a software asset management specialist, said: "I believe the SaaS market will go
through a cycle of maturity, at which point certain providers at the bottom end of the performance
and value for money ladder will be forced out of business."

A further risk could occur as more companies develop new SaaS offerings based on existing
commercial software products. "They may not go through the due diligence of checking with software
suppliers that they can offer the product as a cloud service and will be forced out of business,"
he said.

Canavan urged CIOs to put in place contingencies to ensure that data is accessible in some
manner, even if the cloud provider goes into administration.

2014 is the year when enterprises will begin to claw back control
from overbearing software publishers and sloppy licensing and audit practice

Martin Thompson, Campaign for clear licensing

Beyond cloud applications, enterprise software in general is set to catch up with IT
consumerisation.

"I expect to see beautiful enterprise software, where the big players will start to catch up
with consumer software, realising the importance of [a good] user experience," he said.

The rise in mobile malware could lead to further investment in securing mobile devices. "Mobile
malware will rapidly grow in sophistication and ubiquity in 2014," said Art Coviello, executive
chairman of RSA, the security division of EMC.

Industry challenges in 2014

In the retail market, Chris Webster, head of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini,
expects retailers to re-engineer their linear supply chain and advanced planning systems to support
multi-channel
retail.

While merchandise may have previously moved in bulk from a distribution centre to a store, he
said customers are buying more through digital channels.

"Click and collect is growing very rapidly, and third-party lockers offer great convenience to
customers. Retailers will need to have flexible systems to redirect the supply chain and
orchestrate orders," said Webster.

"The regulators are now regionalising the banks to reduce global interdependency and prevent a
glitch in one country affecting other economies. The day of the true global bank is over, as
governments, regulators and the public have had enough of problems caused elsewhere affecting them.
Lehman was a good example of the global impact," said the CIO.

The growing use of mobile
payments, where mobile banking and retail apps are linked to personal credit card details, has
led to a notable surge in mobile threats, said Rik Ferguson, global vice-president of security
research at Trend Micro.

"Fake banking apps became a common problem in 2013, and legitimate banking apps became a
favoured cyber criminal target," he said.

"Going mobile renders traditional two-step verification methods insufficient for securing
financial transactions. As more people use mobile devices for both banking and authentication,
cyber criminals have started intercepting authentication codes provided by banking institutions to
enable two-factor authentication."

In local
government, the Society for IT Managers (Socitm) predicted that local government will
increasingly use agile methodologies in IT projects, and look for suppliers that offer modular
products rather than all-encompassing and complex frameworks. Data and analytics will be key
drivers in local government this coming year.

Before we can pick up on big data, data quality and data
cleansing is needed

Chris Head, Socitm

"We are seeing a shift from technology to data," said Chris Head, principal associate at Socitm
Insight. "IT is no longer about making sure hardware is up 99.995% of the time."

In the public sector, he said, there were hundreds of business processes, where each one had its
own set of data, often in incompatible formats. "Sometimes data quality is not good. Before we can
pick up on big data, data quality and data cleansing is needed," said Head.

He said the public sector was still not sharing enough data, in spite of the recommendations of
the Laming report following on
from the 2003 enquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie.

"There isn’t a single version of the truth across organisations. Sharing information is
difficult – people hide behind the Data Protection Act,” said Head.

Taking this prediction of the shift in local government’s IT’s focus from technology to data, CIO for
Hampshire County Council, Jos Creese, wrote on his blog: "The value of ‘corporate IT’ will
actually begin to grow again, but only if it’s ‘responsive’ to changing business needs and a ‘door
opener’, not a ‘gatekeeper’."

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